Latinos

Last night I watched the actress and Hilary Clinton’s surrogate, America Ferara on the Bill Mahar show. He asked her why, when 99 percent of Black voters are against Donald Trump, not nearly as many Latinos are? She pondered the question for a while and then said that Latino voters are Americans and as such have many different positions on politics (the same argument could have been used for African Americans). My personal experience, based strictly on my observations and understanding of how the world works, leads me to a more nuanced explanation, though in the final analysis, America is right. We tend to paint everything with too broad a brush stroke and overlook the finer points. What we refer to as Latinos really are people from different countries, cultures, ethnicities and races who have only language as a common thread. Some even come from families that have been in this country longer than most of the Europeans. The “Latinos” in southern Florida for the most part are immigrants and descendants of people who fled Cuba after Castro’s Communist revolution. They were from the upper-middle and upper class with the greater majority of pure European decent. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz (though he is not from southern Florida) are examples. They tend to be strongly anti-communist and fiscally conservative. The Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and others from the Caribbean are greatly influenced by their heritage of slavery. Even immigrants from one country, Mexico, come from different ethnicities and cultures. Most come from rural areas and are indigenous descendants of the Maya with work habits that would put the “Protestant Work Ethic” to shame. These are the Mexicans doing predominantly farm work and other menial labor. Other Mexican immigrants are of primarily European descent who tend to be from urban areas, better educated and more affluent. These various groups have settled in different parts of the country, can have different physical appearances and varying social and economic concerns. Thus their politics are all over the place. Those of pure European decent tend to be less concerned with bigotry, since it is only language that separates them and in one generation that difference disappears. Puerto Ricans are US citizens and not that concerned about immigration but worry about things like wages and poverty. The indigenous are concerned with all the issues; immigration, wages, education, bigotry etc. An effective strategy to win over the Latino votes needs to do more than highlight bigotry and must speak about things that are also of concern to most Americans, addressing initiatives in the Constitution, “establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense promote the general welfare (this is one the Right often overlooks), and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” (I’m following the recent trend of waving the Constitution established at the Democratic Convention). Unlike the very successful Republican “Southern Strategy”, whispering to the prejudices of the Southern whites, the Latino strategy needs to be much broader and appeal to our “better angels”.

Things that Scare Me

Things that Scare Me My parents lived much of their lives under a Soviet regime and seven years toward the end of the war as refugees in Germany. I was quite young during this era but do have some direct memories though most of my observations are second hand through my parents. Also having this past in my history, I am more attentive to news and stories regarding the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The recent move further right in our country and some of the accompanying rhetoric scares me because I see some similarities with this past. HOMELAND: After 9/11 one started hearing more and more about the “Homeland” from politicians of all stripes. This reminds me of the Nazi oft invoked term “fatherland”. “AMERICA FIRST” Donald Trump’s “America first” slogan has a bit of a ring of “Deutschland, Deutschland uber ales” (spelling?) the Nazi motto, meaning Germany above all else. The Germans executed this creed to the letter. Laws, both international and domestic, morals and society as a whole would not stand in the way of the Fatherland. Israel’s right has somewhat of the same philosophy when it comes to what they believe is their God given land. FUNDAMENTAL CHRISTIAN THEOCRACY: During the German occupation the French motto; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, was changed to “work, family, homeland”. This could have been adopted by the right in our country without the blink of an eye. Work a cornerstone of the “Protestant Ethic” is now a central theme: “Bring jobs back”, “paychecks instead of handouts”, “get young Blacks jobs to solve all social ills”. The policies implemented under the guise of “religious freedom” really are moves to insert “Christian values” into our policies much as the move in the early fifties added “in God We Trust” to our currency and “Under God” to our pledge of allegiance. I have seen a slow Republican shift in this direction starting with the politization of the Christian Fundamentalists some decades ago. When asked about the three words that bet describe him, the vice presidential candidate Mike Pence said “Christian, Family Man and Republican”. What happened to American? REPORTING YOUR NEIGHBOR: With the threat of heinous criminal acts by a group of “Radical Islamist Terrorists” (though in his acceptance speech, Donald Trump dropped the “radical” piece of that statement and just called it Islamist terrorism) the government at all levels is now advocating “if you see something report it”. This is reminiscent of the Soviet dogma. As a good citizen, it was your duty to report any anti-communist activities or comments. In fact, to not report it was a crime. As a result, brothers were reporting brothers, sons their mothers and workers their coworkers. The Siberian Gulags were full of people falsely accused because someone didn’t like them or wanted to gain some sort of advantage. DOCUMENTATION: Europe allows citizens from its member countries to travel across their borders without documentation. We, on the other hand, need more and more documents, IDs to vote and passports to travel to countries we never needed them to visit before. Under Stalin’s rule one even had to get documented government authorization to travel within the country, never mind outside. ISLAMAPHOBIA: The Nazis, to rally support invented a common foe, Jews. The Republicans are doing the same today in this country with Muslims. XENOPHOBIA: Patriotism is a very healthy and beautiful thing. Excessive, blind and misguided patriotism is dangerous. Today the right has stolen patriotism, waving flags and reciting slogans. Flag waving was vigorous during Nazi rule in Germany. A friend wrote me the other day saying that it is difficult to have meaningful discussions with Democrats because if you disagree with them they accuse you of racism. The same can be said of the difficulty having meaningful discussions with the right. If one disagrees, they are accused of being unpatriotic. Some time ago I was watching Morning Joe where there was started a discussion on the lowering of qualifications for entry into our military. Joe Scarborough, a Republican and host, said we had a military made up of “the best and brightest”. When a guest asked by what standard? Joe got very angry and started chanting “USA, USA, USA………” thus ending the discussion. Having said all this, I am still optimistic about our great country. One of our main strengths is our ability to correct. As long as we allow the pendulum to swing, we will go a bit too far left and a bit too far right but always turns around and we spend most of the time near the middle. The things we need to be careful of are the policies we put in place which inhibit our ability to adjust or slow us down so much that we lose the ability to properly respond to the rapid changes occurring in the world.

Our Culture vs Their Culture

We humans have a weakness in that the familiar appears normal to us and the unfamiliar abnormal. As a young boy, looking through the National Geographic Magazine (as young boys do) I noticed how strange women in Africa wearing many neck rings to elongate their necks or Indian women wearing nose rings looked. As I became a young man I began to see similarities between these customs and ours in the West. How different is stretching ones neck with neckbands from enlarging the breasts with implants or puffing up lips with Botox. Though the methods differ, the aim is the same, to enhance beauty. Wearing rings in the nose, which we now do in the West, in my eyes is no different than wearing rings in the ears. Wearing hijabs is strange to us but yarmulkes normal, though are cultural/religious. Modesty is locally defined. A woman with her head uncovered will be persecuted in Iran and Saudi Arabia. We look at this as primitive. A woman on the beach topless in the US today will be persecuted because she is not adhering to local customs of modesty. In Europe topless bathing is a common practice and we are thought of by some as primitive. Many years ago, while visiting Morocco, a majority Muslim country, we stayed at a modern hotel for western tourists in Marrakech. European women routinely sunbathed at the pool topless. The hotel adhered to the European standard of modesty. I strongly suspect were they to remove their bottoms they would be asked to leave. Customs are not only differ geographically but also temporally. In the early nineteen hundreds women here went to the beech covered from neck to toe as do some Muslim women today. In the fifties they wore one piece bathing suits whereas today bikinis are the common beach ware. During the “Dark Ages” women in Europe covered themselves, including their heads, much as do women in some of the Muslim cultures today. Some time ago I was watching a program featuring a primitive tribe somewhere in the mountains of Southeast Asia. They were interviewing a young teenage girl who was dressed in a colorful skirt but breasts uncovered. She was sitting very modestly on a rock with her legs crossed; so elegant in her manners, speech and movement, she could have been the daughter of proud, cultured western parents. When we see customs from different cultures, we should think about our own and ask how different are they really from ours particularly at some point in time?

Why do they Hate us (and Want to Kill us)?

This was a question posed to me the other night at a family gathering by a non-Muslim assuming that I, as a Muslim had some special insight into the minds of an irrational, vicious cult. To answer that question we first needs to understand who “they” are. Unfortunately the Right Wing media, wanting to stoke Islamophobia and fear to gain a political advantage, paints the “they” with a very broad stroke as Muslims. (I read the reporting on the recent Bangladesh massacre in the New York Times, PBS, BBC, Aljizeera and Fox. It’s interesting that Fox was the only one leading off with an Islamophobic “dog whistle” in the first sentence reporting that the terrorists were heard saying Allah Whakbar, which translated means God is Great, equivalent to something like “praise the Lord”). The Right even insist that the President call terrorism “Islmaic”. In analyzing who the “they” are lets first look at Christianity which most of us are more familiar with. Christianity, though consisting of many groups (Manicheans, Copts) can be divided into the two major groups, the Catholics and Protestants. The Protestants in turn have many sub groups such as Lutheran, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Methodist, Baptist, etc. Among the Baptists are the Southern Baptists and the extremely homophobic and Islamophobic Westboro Baptists, a radical sect, and various Evangelical splinter groups (though I’m not sure all Evangelicals are Baptists). When the Westboro Baptists Church pickets the burial of a gay soldier killed in War, we don’t think, or the media reports it, as a Baptist, Protestant nor Christian act. We attribute the action rightly to the Westboro Baptists. Now the non-Muslim members of the family gathering would say “but they don’t kill people”. OK, let’s look at another case. Many of the Fundamentalist Protestant, especially those believing in “Armageddon” in their life time, are Zionist and supporters of the Israeli Right and the occupation of Palestine. The Bible is their justification, seeing that these lands were given to the Israelites by God. (In fact I would venture to bet that a larger percentage of Evangelical Fundamentalists are Zionists then are American or Israeli Jews.) When Israel attacks Gaza or Israeli terrorists kill Palestinians (In the last ten years there have been 129 Israeli children killed by Palestinians and more than 1,500 Palestinian children killed by Israelis), we don’t say that Christians are Zionists and support the oppressive, and illegal occupation of the West Bank and through this support are in part responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians and the displacement of millions. If we said it at all, we would rightly say that some Evangelicals are supportive of Israeli aggression. And we don’t expect people to explain this action as Christians but as human beings. (I believe it is the Methodist Church that is divesting itself of investments in companies whose products are used to uphold the occupation of the West Bank. We don’t say that Protestants or Christians are divesting their holdings, but the Methodist Church.) Let me start by admitting that I know very little about Islam and having lived all my life in predominantly Christian areas, know more about Christianity. Now getting to Muslim’s responsibility for terrorism, as with Christianity, Islam also consists of many groups and sects. The major division is between the Sunni, by far the majority, and the Shia. The Sunni are more like the Protestants in that they believe there is no intermediary between them and God, whereas the Shia have the Ayatollahs and the Catholics the Popes as intermediaries. One of the factions, the Wahhabis, a small minority of Sunnis, though the state religion in Saudi Arabia, has the most fundamental interpretation of the Quran. The Salafis, a violent subset of the Wahhabis which I believe came into being with the start of European colonialism, took an even more of a fundamentalist interpretation and used religion to justify violence. The Muslim Brotherhood split from the Salafis and became more political and less violent though still fundamentalist. The Islamic State of Syria (ISIS) follows the Salafi interpretation of the Quran and since that is not the interpretation of the Shia nor the vast majority of Sunni Muslims throughout the world, it is totally inappropriate to expect non-Salafi Muslims to explain or feel guilty for their actions no more than it is for Baptists, never mind Christians as a whole, to explain the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church or the Zionism of some fundamentalists.